Using bilateral trade data on WTO disputes from 1995 to 2010 within the framework of multilateral trade, this paper empirically investigates whether legally winning a WTO dispute leads to actual trade gains. This study helps to illuminate the efficacy of the WTO dispute settlement system and to understand the role of the system as an institutional device for promoting multilateral trade liberalization. Assessing differential effects of the WTO dispute settlement rulings and the legal status of participants, this paper examines how trade gains are created and distributed among WTO members. Our empirical findings suggest that winning a legal dispute contributes to multilateral trade liberalization, not merely by rectifying trade problems for prevailing complainants but more so by providing better market access for all WTO members. This result reaffirms that the WTO dispute settlement system fulfills its purpose as a regulatory instrument for promoting multilateralism and market competition.

Interaction between regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the multilateral trading system established by the World Trade Organization (WTO) is an issue of significance but nevertheless remains unsettled. This article aims to explore the influence RTAs have generated had on the WTO system, with particular focus on the approach adopted by the adjudicators when dealing with irreconcilable RTA–WTO conflicts. During the development of 20 years’ jurisprudence, WTO adjudicators offered responses to a number of critical questions. On the one hand, direct endorsement of RTA provisions with the effect of prevailing over the counterpart WTO rules appears to be very difficult, either through legal interpretation or application. On the other hand, unlike often being argued, a close review of WTO case law does not reveal a biased adjudicatory approach against regionalism, as compared to other sources of public international law. When dealing with RTA-related matters, the Appellate Body has been advocating an all-encompassing approach featured by the emphasis on the common intention during the interpretative exercise and the promotion for the WTO built-in mechanisms for valid modification. Such an approach is, to a certain extent, misleading in the RTA –WTO context and has led to certain ill-founded adjudicatory choice.

Without a properly functioning dispute process, the obligations in a trade agreement may not be worth much. As part of the NAFTA renegotiation, the NAFTA parties should try to fix certain flaws in the NAFTA Chapter 20 dispute settlement process that emerged a few years after NAFTA came into force. Chapter 20 was used regularly in its early years, but usage dropped considerably after panel selection was blocked in a case involving US restrictions on Mexican sugar. In this paper, we examine recent innovations on panel selection in the TPP, CETA, and JEEPA dispute provisions, and draw from those to develop principles that can guide revisions to the NAFTA Chapter 20 panel selection process.

In anti-dumping procedures, the EU authorities have adjusted State-distorted input costs in the constructed normal value to market benchmarks. This methodology increases the amount of anti-dumping duties and hence import barriers to foreign goods produced with low-priced raw materials. Such cost adjustments are based on certain EU anti-dumping provisions that implement corresponding World Trade Organization (WTO) rules under which the cost of input must be derived, as a principle, from the records of target companies in the exporting country if those records, inter alia, reasonably reflect production costs of the product under investigation. But in the case of input costs distorted by the government, the EU authorities have typically deviated from this principle relying on alternative sources on the grounds of unreasonable costs. While the EU jurisprudence has so far been generally lenient towards this methodology as applied to significant distortions in the raw material (upstream) market, the recent WTO appellate ruling in EU–Biodiesel is rather negative on its use in the presence of the valid domestic records. This article examines the EU anti-dumping practice as reviewed in both EU and WTO judicial proceedings and discusses some legislative reforming options under both regimes. It concludes that the WTO anti-dumping rules should be amended to allow market-oriented cost adjustments in the normal value, on the one hand, and ensure parallel export price adjustments, on the other.

Global fossil fuel subsidies are substantial and contribute to climate change. They also undermine the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. However, under the WTO, the international community's foremost economic institution, it is renewable energy subsidies, not fossil fuel subsidies, that have been subjected to litigation. To date, no fossil fuel subsidy has ever been brought before the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB). This paper makes a unique contribution to the literature on energy subsidies by applying the WTO covered Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (1994) (SCM Agreement) to a specific government measure designed to support the coal export industry in Australia: namely, the proposed concessional loan for the construction of a rail line between the Carmichael coal mine and Abbot Point coal port by the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF). In finding that this measure is in breach of the SCM Agreement, this paper foreshadows future litigation and provides guidance to non-government organizations (NGOs) seeking to identify other unlawful fossil fuel subsidies.

Scholars and policymakers have long debated whether the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) enhances development through increased trade – i.e., whether the program is effective as a form of ‘trade-as-aid’. We argue that, by itself, GSP increases poor-country exports, but that when recipients join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) or its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), they realize fewer imports, and less gains in total trade, than GSP recipients that do not join the multilateral trading system. The logic is that GATT/WTO membership makes GSP more predictable by making it non-discriminatory, in the sense that exporters in recipient countries are less vulnerable to the program's ad hoc conditionality. This leads these exporters to lobby less against domestic protectionism, yielding higher trade barriers at home, and thus fewer imports. We test this hypothesis using a gravity model of trade, and data on all GSP programs, and find strong support for the argument that the GATT/WTO's interaction with GSP undermines trade.